Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Category: Writing Articles

  • I’m still learning how to get LaTeX to work on Overleaf

    My energy and efforts have been focused on producing high quality academic content since July 21. Instead of blogging away I focused on that introduction to machine learning syllabus I have been preparing. I’m even doing the typesetting in LaTeX using the Overleaf website in preparation to be a better academic. It seemed like a good idea to learn how to publish academic papers using LaTeX. Generally, I have been able to get away with using Microsoft Word to prepare things or sometimes Google Docs. It seems the world has changed and the serious people writing serious papers are all using LaTeX these days. It took me about an hour, maybe two hours to start getting the hang of it and I don’t really like it at all. It’s a clumsy method for typesetting and while I get that the focus is on the end product and how it looks as a PDF the actual process of typesetting is tedious. My basis of comparison is that I can very easily write in APA formatting in Microsoft Word and work from start to finish on a document. It’s fine really as a platform for documenting words and processing them. I get that the idea of LaTeX and the storage of documents in PDF format is to ensure that the documents are portable and readable for as long as possible. Anyway, I’m still learning how to get LaTeX to work on Overleaf. I have the first 3 parts of that syllabus loaded up and I’ll get adding part by part until all 8 are loaded. I’ll give it a really good proofreading and then try to submit it for preprint. That is the plan anyway.

  • Latest paper research notes

    Over the last few days, I have been looking at sketches of the healthcare landscape in the United States. My research is strictly limited to that universe of care at the moment. Maybe later I could do some comparative analysis, but at the moment a limited universe is necessary to make progress on this initial research effort. I have a very large Moleskine sketchbook that has A3 size pages. Which for those of you who do not know happens to be 11.75 inches by 16.5 inches. That gives me plenty of space to sketch out ideas. At the moment, I have been working on three different sketches that will be converted from sketch to slide at some point. That effort includes mapping the healthcare space, plotting the next 5 years, and a sketch of where ML will be in that 5 year mapping of healthcare. My initial analysis showed a bunch of different ways to look at things. It feels like the overall ecosystem is being pushed from a lot of directions instead of being driven organically into a cohesive mesh.

  • Horizons vs. edges

    Today could be a day of deep focus on things just down the road a little bit. Pondering that perfect possible future is always near the edge of my thoughts, but today for some reason I’m not trying to look just past the edge of what is possible. At the moment, I’m just looking at the horizon and my focus is not just beyond it at the moment. Maybe my two shots of Nespresso have not kicked all the way in or it is going to be one of those days where questions outpace whimsy. Anyway that pretty much sums up where my thoughts are at the moment. My talks as a speaker are generally lined up for the year. I’m doing weekly research for The Lindahl Letter into machine learning and at some point I’m going to spend some time working on traditional academic papers. 

    One of the deeper questions about my academic trajectory has been about really focusing on churning out academic papers and putting all of my focus on that path toward journal articles or continuing down the more general road of writing. It’s a real conundrum and for the most part I have let the wind take me in the direction of my greatest interest for the last 10 years. That direction has been toward the path of doing and being closer to the pracademic side of things than the traditional academic way of muddling through. Now that my experiences are stacking up in a positive direction it might be time to work on that balance and figure out somewhere in the middle to exist. From everything I can tell right now the academic world is facing a real overwhelming supply surge in content creation that is not resulting in the type of synthesis that translates and summarizes the overall fields. Driving complexity into specializations has made the depth part of the equation so overwhelming that any attempt at pure breath in a field fails for one person to handle.

  • The reflective Wednesday conjecture

    Today was going to be one of those days that builds up and then drifts away. Maybe that is my fault. Every day you have the chance to seize the day and make something special happen. One of the things that I really enjoy about attending conferences and learning new things is that it creates the potential for a spark of invocation. Maybe that means pulling two things together or maybe making something out of nothing based on the spark of innovation. It is one of those things that when you see it you know it and it can slip away so quickly. Some days are just like that and you can make things happen that would otherwise take a long time. It is those moments of clarity that you cannot waste. You have to treat them like the precious opportunity they are to move things forward.

    Today my Google Pixelbook Go Chromebook actually paired to my Pixel 4 XL smartphone to get mobile data without any problems. That was nice. Where I am sitting right now does not have any really solid WiFi options. During the course of writing I do not need to use very much bandwidth to access the internet, but it is nice to have the option. Typically, I find not having access to the internet slows me down. It is probably just one of those things I need to work on moving past at some point. Earlier today I was thinking about a bunch of different academic paper topics. Sometimes it is easier than others to put the drafts together. I used to keep an idea notebook that helped push my research interests forward. Maybe it is time to bring that back. My overall publishing productivity has been down in the last 5 years. The only way to really work on fixing that is to actively write papers. Part of that is working literature reviews and the other part of it is completing research projects.

    My automated survey technology was ready and running for years. Maybe now is the time to turn that setup back on and pull together the data necessary to create a few research papers. This time around I could just share the code on GitHub and allow others to make the data collection magic happen. That is probably the right way to go about things. The only drawback for reproducibility is that the code would have to run on some server, but people have a lot more ways to get a server these days. Maybe that is something that I will start working on later this week. I’m still trying to finish up that “Google IT Automation with Python” course series. It has taken a little longer than I had expected. I’m probably going to have to focus in on knocking out part of it every night for the next 20 days to really finish it up. That has to happen in tandem with my efforts to create a new speaking presentation that focuses on walking some machine learning use case ROI example from start to finish.

    It seems like a few things are stacking up. Normally, I like to work in real time and finish anything that pops up with extreme alacrity. From time to time that is not possible. The things that need to be done are bigger than the slices of time that I have to complete tasks. Like right now that course is eating up a lot of cycles of time that could be used to do some other things, but learning and pushing things forward is an important part of the process. Being a lifelong learner is a commitment that requires both time and effort to make happen. It would be easier to stop taking on hard challenges, but that would not be the right thing to do.

  • 2019 Speaker Video Questions

    Earlier this week, I got sent a set of interview questions to help make a short speaker video for a conference I’m attending later this year. The questionnaire included a ton of different topics. I thought it might be good to just write out my thoughts real quick here and then try to distil the best of that brainstorming into a 3 minute video later today. My plan is to give the questions a quick once over and then circle back to each of them a couple times to really make sure they get all of the consideration they deserve.

    Answer all of the following:
    Introductory Questions

    Q: Name, company, job title
    A: Dr. Nels Lindahl, a fortunate 10 company, Director – Clinical Systems

    Q: A bit about what you do
    A: Every day I work to help solve meaningful problems in the healthcare space.

    Q: A bit about your AI background
    A: Thanks to my quantitative background including Ph.D. level statistics I was able to jump in and start taking advantage of all the open source software available. That quantitative background helped me feel comfortable to jump in and do any training I could find to help learn how to apply AI to everyday business problems. I’m well over 40 certificates or badges at this point 😉

    Answer 2-3 of the following:
    AI-related Questions

    Q: What excites you the most about AI?
    A: Possibility. Opening the door to new insights and data driven decisions is so powerful. The open source community has really democratized the first push and made it easy to breakdown the barriers that would have prevented AI at scale.

    Q: What are you most looking forward to at Ai4 Healthcare?
    A: Talking to people and learning about what inspires them to push things forward.

    Q: What does AI mean to you?
    A: AI to me is the applied application of programing to problems where intelligence, learning, simulation, or modeling benefit the process. That is probably a more nuanced answer than building or modeling human type cognition with a digital space.

    Q: Who is the ideal person to attend your talk?
    A: Anyone who is thinking about how to apply machine learning concepts to real world problems. Anybody that is daring to wonder how do we scale this up in an applied way to start solving problems.

    Q: How do you interact with AI on a day-to-day basis?
    A: My entire day is spent around huge data sources and data streams that face challenges and provide opportunities to really dig in and understand problems in meaningful ways. All my spare time is spent digging into TensorFlow notebooks and learning python.

    Q: What sparked your interest in AI?
    A: Back in 1998, I started learning LISP and wanted to do amazing things that just were not possible at the time. Now the power of open source libraries have opened the door to all those things that seemed out of reach.

    Q: Where do you see AI bringing the Healthcare industry?
    A: It is entirely possible that AI is going to drive the Healthcare industry to highly customized applications of drug therapies and away from formulary based management. That change toward customization in the pharmacy world will fundamentally change clinical trials and how we think about applied medicine. Imagine treatment based on a mapping of your specific genome resulting in custom printed tablets vs. treatments that generally worked at a specific strength during clinical trials.

    Q: What impacts do you think AI has already had on the Healthcare industry
    A: Speed to market for new treatments is facing real public pressure. All of the news reporting around how AI can be used to speed up drug development creates pricing and speed pressures within a marketplace that was already tightening.

    Answer 1-2 of the following:
    Fun Questions

    Q: What is the best vacation you have ever taken?
    A: One of the first vacation I had to Rocky Mountain was just really fantastic. The weather at the time combined with the beautiful scenic views of mountain trails was really majestic.

    Q: What is your favorite thing to do outside of work?
    A: Reading. It is ok to make reading your hobby today. I give you full permission.

  • Keeping track of what you read

    This morning I woke up and read a few articles about artificial intelligence before my thoughts wandered back to sports trading cards. A lot of my article reading is happening on my Pixel 3 XL phone and it is a scrolling type of consuming content. On this computer here that runs Windows 10 I had thought about getting back into using EndNote to capture all of my citations. That is always a challenging thing to deal with when it comes keeping track of two different types of content. Online media and academic journals are always two different types of content that have to be tracked in different ways.

    One of the things that I need to get back into the habit of doing is generally tracking content, but really digging into specific topics for literature reviews. Over the last couple of weeks I started planning out an article. It all started by drawing things out on a page from a Moleskine A3 size sketchbook. Yeah — that is a 11.75″ x 16.5″ giant drawing pad. Sometimes that is easier to work with than my whiteboard. All of that drawing and thinking set the stage for an area of inquiry that will be the seed for an interesting literature review.